UNITED STATES
The Daily Beast
Brandy Zadrozny
Two siblings say a foster program that placed Native American children with white Mormon families failed to intervene and stop years of alleged abuse.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did nothing to protect two Navajo children from sexual abuse in the 1970s and early 1980s while they were enrolled in a program to convert and assimilate Native American students, according to a lawsuit filed in Navajo Nation District Court last week.
The plaintiffs are asking for unspecified damages, as well as a letter of apology to them and to the entire Navajo Nation; a change in church policy requiring church members to report charges of sexual abuse to the police; and the creation of a task force that would help to restore the Navajo culture that some participants say the program effectively erased.
Now-adult siblings RJ and MM—The Daily Beast does not identify alleged victims of sexual abuse—left their home on a reservation in Sawmill, Arizona at ages 10 and 11, respectively, to be part of the Mormon church’s Indian Student Placement Program, a controversial voluntary foster care initiative that baptized some 40,000 children between 1947 and 2000 and brought them to live with white, Mormon families during the school year.
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